Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
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Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (掌の小説 Tenohira no Shōsetsu?) is the name Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata gave to more than 140 short stories he wrote over his long career, the earliest published in the 1920 and the last appearing posthumously in 1972. The stories are characterized by their brevity, some less than a page long, and their dramatic concision.
Although scattered individual stories had previously appeared in English, in 1988 Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman published the first substantial volume of English translations, a total of 71 stories drawn from the period of almost 50 years from 1922 until Kawabata's death in 1972, as Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Dunlop and Holman's collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux under the North Point Press imprint in 2006. In 1998, Holman's translations of another 20 of the palm-of-the-hand stories that had been published originally in Japanese before 1930 appeared in the book, The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories, published by Counterpoint Press.
